On Thanksgiving, something to be thankful for!
This guy is in jail - for 20 years!
From ABC News:
A federal judge in North Dakota
sentenced a Jamaican man to 20 years in prison on Tuesday for a lottery
scam that authorities say cost victims around the country millions of
dollars.
A jury in May convicted 26-year-old Sanjay Williams, of Montego Bay, Jamaica,
of 35 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering. U.S.
District Court Judge Daniel Hovland sentenced Williams during a 2 ½ hour
court appearance, during which Williams was defiant and often
argumentative with the Bismarck-based judge.
Williams said the allegations against him were "fictitious" and the "jury failed to use their common sense" when convicting him.
Investigators describe Williams and Lavrick Willocks as leaders of two separate scamming operations based in Jamaica.
Frank Gasper, a Bismarck-based FBI agent, said more than 80 of the
victims of Willocks and Williams have been identified and their losses
are more than $5.6 million. Willocks has been charged but not extradited
to the United States.
Prosecutors said the case came to light four years ago when Edna
Schmeets, 86, of Harvey, North Dakota, received a call from a man who
told her she had won $19 million and a new car, and needed only to pay
taxes and fees. The process dragged on until the widow's savings were
wiped out, a sum of more than $300,000.
A teary Schmeets told Hovland that she "lost everything" and has been "hurt not only financially but emotionally."
Schmeets said she shared her story with the judge so that others would not be taken by scammers.
"It's hard to think you could fall for this stuff," Schmeets told
Hovland. "I don't know how they get you, but they do. It's almost like
they hypnotize you."
Marlow McMahan, of Salt Lake City, Utah, traveled to North Dakota to see
Williams sentenced "and put where he can't hurt anyone again."
McMahan, 84, did not say how much he lost in the scam, though he told
the judge he was forced to borrow from banks and friends to claim a
bogus multimillion dollar prize.
"I come from a time when your word was your word and when somebody tells
me I won millions of dollars, I believe them," McMahan told the judge.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Clare Hochhalter, the lead prosecutor in the
case, also posted on a video screen a suicide letter from a 72-year-old
woman who was taken in by the scam.
In recent years, estimates by U.S. officials put the yearly take by
Jamaican fraudsters at $300 million, but some American authorities
suspected the total was far higher. In 2012, C. Steven Baker, a
Chicago-based director with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, told The Associated Press that Jamaica's scammers could be bilking Americans out of $1 billion a year.